i run a customized gui with all the unnecessary buttons and menus removed .. not sure if it helps loadtimes ..
more ram would probably help too.. 2 gigs here.. If i am loading it first time around it takes a bit over 20 seconds .. any time after that is rather quick ..
yeah i'm running a machine with 2 gigs as well,
i'm mainly interested in knowing about the biggest and most useless features of max, if they can be removed.
afaik, less bits to load, means less loading time overall.
i read on an article somewhere some tips:
-in stead of having a lot of very small objects (below 200 tri's) it is better to have one large. (so combine them)
-save in the lowest quality display (i think that would be wireframe or bounding box)
-turn off all of the things you don't need to see (like display lights and camera's and stuff like that)
and more stuff like that. I'm pretty sure you can find the article somewhere on the internet by googling it up.
it might be that this article was about maya but i think it doesn't matter very much.
The smallest I ever got max was around 90 MB, load times were about 30 secs on a Pentium III. Mostly I was stripping out material libraries, offline render stuff, modifiers, and plugins...but there are so many obscure dependencies in max, finding which plugins are ok to delete is an exercise in trial and error...sometimes max will seem to work fine, until you pull up a command that depends on something you erased to work...unless you work in QA and have no problems testing every single possibility until it's stable.. it's not really worth the effort.
If you're really interested though, pull up the plugin manager and check which ones load on start that you don't really need.
well, if you aren't going to be doing any serious animating or character work, you can see about disabling the loading of the character studio/skinning tools from being loaded on startup. If you are just modeling and texturing you can also get rid of any mental ray or other rendering plugins that are being loaded on startup, too. Or, like snowfly said, check out the plugin manager. Maybe you can disable most of the plugins from loading on startup, and then manually load a plugin when you need it.
I remember that you can set up multiple shortcuts to run max, and have it specify a different startup configuration. That way you could have a couple different shortcuts that'll let you start with only the key pieces you might need for a particular task.
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more ram would probably help too.. 2 gigs here.. If i am loading it first time around it takes a bit over 20 seconds .. any time after that is rather quick ..
i'm mainly interested in knowing about the biggest and most useless features of max, if they can be removed.
afaik, less bits to load, means less loading time overall.
-in stead of having a lot of very small objects (below 200 tri's) it is better to have one large. (so combine them)
-save in the lowest quality display (i think that would be wireframe or bounding box)
-turn off all of the things you don't need to see (like display lights and camera's and stuff like that)
and more stuff like that. I'm pretty sure you can find the article somewhere on the internet by googling it up.
it might be that this article was about maya but i think it doesn't matter very much.
If you're really interested though, pull up the plugin manager and check which ones load on start that you don't really need.
I remember that you can set up multiple shortcuts to run max, and have it specify a different startup configuration. That way you could have a couple different shortcuts that'll let you start with only the key pieces you might need for a particular task.